I won’t go into it at length since Loren Baker has such a long post about the social networkification of Answers. But this change in my view was a missing element to make the service into something more valuable and reliable. (Business network LinkedIn added answers capabilities several months ago.)
While Yahoo! Answers has millions of users and is already an established success from that standpoint, I often heared comments that derided the quality of responses and thus the overall utility of the site. Creating trusted circles/networks within Answers helps address the “quality” problem.
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Here’s the Answers Team blog post about the network.
